Book Spotlight: Saon Ray | A Primer on Electric Vehicles in India: A Machine-Generated Literature Overview

The title is A Primer on Electric Vehicles in India: A Machine-Generated Literature Overview. So, this book is written with my co-author Deb Mukherjee. So, he is into the automotive sector and I am an economist.

Motivation for the book

We basically wanted to combine two elements in this book. One is the economic perspective, the other is the technological perspective. So, the two authors having these two different perspectives actually led to the genesis of the book.

Also, Springer approached us that they would be trying out a new format for the book. They would generate the literature through a machine generated literature and so, this book in fact, uses the Springer generated overviews with the research that we have done and it brings together some of the key questions on the EV sector in India. 

Themes explored

So, we take actually a value chain approach. So, we look at the raw material, we look at the technology, then we go downstream into issues that how are states doing as far as regulations is concerned to end with a little bit of a geopolitical question given that a lot of critical minerals are used in electric vehicles and which are imported by the country. So, there are three key questions that this book looks at. Firstly, that this paradigm shift that is happening in the EV sector in the automotive sector that is we are moving from automobiles, ICE engines to electric vehicles that is the first and how this transition is going to work for the country.

The second is it looks at the value chain, the entire value chain of the electric vehicle and what are the bottlenecks, what is working, what is not working and then it brings in that key policy questions that the sector needs to address through some of the regulations that either the center or the state has enforced. So, I study value chains and in fact, the interesting thing was that when you look at the say the value chain of the automotive ICE engine that has about 8000 parts, but the electric vehicle actually has much fewer parts, but and the battery in fact, is one of the very key component of the electric vehicle and it is about 60 to 70 percent of the cost of the vehicle is actually coming from the battery. So, the two industries are so similar in some sense and one is transitioning from the automobile to the ICE to the electric vehicle, but the two chains are so different and so, and it brings with it the transition is bringing to with it a lot of new questions that are not part of the automobile industry. So, for me the this was a very interesting find. 

Misconceptions Challenged

One of the misconceptions, popular misconceptions is that if it rains, electric vehicles are dangerous and that you might actually get a shock, there is no such thing that might happen. The only thing is that if the roads get flooded and you use an electric vehicle in that, there may be damage to the car. But, the fact I mean if it rains and you will get a shock that is a very that is a misconception that cannot happen actually. 

Takeaways for readers

I think we hope that the readers understand that you know we are coming at it from two slightly different perspectives, the economic and the technological and by combining these two, we hope to give them overview of the whole sector and given that the EV transition is going to be a very important transition in our attainment of the net zero pathways for the country, this is going to be a very important knowledge product to fill that gap. So, one of the things about writing books is that they take a lot of time because a lot of research has to be done.

So, the format that was tried out in this book is that the literature overview has been generated through AI. Now, there are some limitations of AI which we are all aware of, but this can hasten the process by a couple of months at least, but then the product that you get out of that you have to work on that. So, it can give you a head start.

The other thing that we realized is that the chapters in this book are quite small compared to a traditional book and the reason for this is that the attention span of most people is you know it is waning. So, shorter chapters and crisper chapters are perhaps needed to get people's attention. So, and each chapter can be read by itself.

You do not need to read the entire book if you want to only delve into one particular issue. So, I think that has been another you know key learning for me as also as a researcher. Thank you.